JOHN LEWIS-STEMPEL explodes the myth that British and German troops called a Christmas Day truce to play a seasonal game of football.

As twilight faded on Christmas Eve 1914, a strange stillness settled on the frost-rimed trenches of the Western Front.

Across the barbed-wire desolation of No-Man’s Land there drifted the unmistakable notes of the carol “Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht”.

British soldiers started to lull the English translation, Silent Night.

German voices shouted: “Come over here Tommy! We won’t shoot.”

Peeking over the parapet, British soldiers saw that the tops of the enemy trenches were decked out with Christmas trees lighted with candles.

On Christmas Day German soldiers clambered out of the trenches and gingerly picked their way across No-Man’s Land.

British soldiers rose to greet them. Tommy and Fritz shook hands, swopped cigs and played a good-natured game of football.

The Germans won 3-2.

For a day or more, against the orders of their superiors, ordinary soldiers forgot their enmity and celebrated the Christian festival of peace in the middle of war.

The Christmas Truce of 1914 is a magical story to rival the Nativity.

Sainsbury’s slick, heartwarming TV re-enactment, “Christmas is for sharing”, has had 15 million hits on YouTube.

The supermarket is far from being the first chronicler of the Great Christmas Truce.

It has been the subject of movies, novels and inspired Paul McCartney’s Pipes Of Peace song, complete with video in which the saintly Macca played both a Fritz and a Tommy.

In the poptastic 1990 hit Altogether Now, The Farm hymned: “A spirit stronger than war was working that night…

"They joined tog ether and decided not to fight.”

Remember when you were a child and some smart-aleck informed you: “Father Christmas doesn’t exist?”

Stand by for the adult version: The Christmas Truce is almost wholly a myth.

Messrs Sainsbury, Macca, The Farm & All have taken one scene from December 25, 1914, doused it with saccharine and presented it as the whole drama.

True, there were touching instances of soldiers fraternising on December 25, 1914, in the unholy land of war.

Private Henry Williamson, future author of Tarka The Otter, was given tobacco by a German soldier and wrote to his mother: “Yesterday the British and Germans met and shook hands in the Ground between the trenches and exchanged souvenirs and shook hands.

"Yes, all day Xmas day, and as I write. Marvellous, isn’t it?”

A German barber gave shortback-and-sides cuts to British “customers” in a crater.

Jokingly the barber suggested: “Maybe I was the real business of the truce; bodies had been lying in No-Man’s Land for weeks, months even."

As Rifleman J Reading wrote to his wife: “We took advantage of the quiet day and brought our dead in.”

Soldiers also fraternised with less than angelic intent.

The essential unity of Britons and Germans and the Truce myth became unstoppable

Writing from France on Christmas Day 100 years ago, General Walter Congreve VC described how the truce had exposed the lair of a German sniper.

One British soldier told Congreve: “They say he’s killed more of our men than any other 12 together but I know now where he shoots from and I hope we down him tomorrow.”

In his book The Small Peace in the Great War, German historian Michael Juergs details soldiers from both sides scouting opposition lines with the ambition of making a killing in the morning.

It was not all quiet on the Western Front on Christmas Day.

There was no miraculous, generalised outbreak of peace, more a series of shortlived truces for practical purposes.

Some sections of the British line witnessed heavy fighting.

About 80 British soldiers died in action on the 25th and 62 on Boxing Day.

The Grenadier Guards spent the Saviour’s Day in pitched battle and one Tommy wrote bitterly to his parents: “Perhaps you read of the conversation on Christmas Day between us and the Germans. It’s all lies.

"The sniping went on just the same; in fact, our captain was wounded, so don’t believe what you see in the papers.”

Where there was a truce, it was often uneasy.

Walter Congreve declined the invitation to fraternise with the Fritzes: “I thought they might not be able to resist a general.”

He was a wise man.

Sergeant Blackwood Jones recalled a comrade who took some tobacco and jam to the Germans, only to be shot in the back as he returned to his trench.

“He fell down and said: ‘My God, I’m done’,” Jones wrote.

“They are dirty cowards, after [our] giving them tobacco.”

On both sides there were soldiers against fraternisation.

The spirit of Christmas goodwill bypassed the French almost entirely, while a certain Corporal Adolf Hitler of the 16th Bavarians reproved his comrades for their unmilitary conduct: “Such things should not happen in wartime.

"Have you Germans no sense of honour left at all?”

German troops involved in the truces were mainly from Bavaria and Saxony.

They loathed the Prussians running the German war effort and news of the truces was suppressed in Germany.

Though they took a tough line officially, many British officers tacitly approved the truce.

The frost which hardened the ground on Christmas Eve allowed supplies to be brought up. I do have some tidings of comfort and joy.

“Live and let live” temporary truces were in fact common on the Western Front for “housekeeping”; recovering dead and shoring up trenches.

Ceasefires were part of war-as-usual. The Great War was not entirely without decency.

What of the iconic football match? The one where, according to Sainsbury’s, the Germans put down coats for goalposts?

Well it led to one of the Great Blackadder Goes Forth jokes, with Captain Blackadder protesting about the game: “Remember it? How could I forget it? I was never offside!”

Alas, there is no certain proof of an organised Britain v Germany match on Christmas Day 1914.

There were a few kickabouts, usually with a Fray Bentos tin substitute ball, but No-Man’s Land shellholes were not conducive to playing football.

Until the 1960s the Christmas Truce was hardly recalled but in the Love & Peace decade a belief that innocent soldiers were forced to kill each other by militaristic establishments mushroomed.

We also commenced détente with the West Germans, a buffer against Communism.

The Christmas Truce, when young Fritzes and young Tommies supposedly joined hands across the wire, was the ideal parable of the essential unity of Britons and Germans and the Truce myth became unstoppable.

In 2008 a memorial to “The Christmas Truce” was erected in Frelinghien, France, and a football match between Royal Welch Fusiliers and the Bundeswehr, staged to commemorate the “original”.